The advent and growth of computer networks enables businesses to provide customers and other businesses access to documents from an increasing number of network-based resources, such as Web servers, database servers and enterprise systems. To maintain proper business practices, a business must ensure not only that information published in these documents is accurate, but also that the information is suitable for the purpose which it is provided, such as the price of a product is matched with the correct product in a product catalog. To this end, businesses typically rely on content management systems to control the publication of documents associated with their business.
One type of a content management system is a software-based system that executes processes for managing content for electronic publishing. It supports a variety of document formats and provides access to content generated by different entities. Although this versatility makes a content management system an ideal resource publishing documents in a network environment, problems may arise when synchronizing documents obtained from separate sources. This problem is aggravated when modifications to documents are not limited to a single piece of information, but to an entire class of information in a business processing chain. For example, a change to data to a first document may require a similar or different change to a second document implemented by the processing chain. Thus, there is a need to provide an efficient way of communicating changes to documents across various entities of a business and its business processing chain such that the changes are synchronized among the various documents impacted by the change. Further, there is a need for an efficient manner of enforcing relationships between information included in documents implemented by a business processing chain to ensure valid information is published with a document.